Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Normative concerns for ownership fundamentally regulate social interaction regarding resources in humans, but little is known about origins of ownership inferences and evaluations tin earliest human development. Here, we ask if normative evaluations of ownership respect are rooted in an early-developing protomoral dispreference for those who violate ownership. Across two studies (N = 66) infants saw puppet shows where an owner was approached by a non-owner who attempted to take the owner's resource. Infants were subsequently allowed to choose between the two puppets. We controlled for the dominance implications of the outcomes of resource competition by systematically varying whether the non-owner or owner prevailed in attaining the resource. Both studies yielded clear Bayesian evidence that infants did not preferentially reach towards either the owner or ownership violator. These results suggest that infants do not hold strong negative evaluations of those who violate ownership.